Biography – The Tolkien Society J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch By David Doughan MBE Who was Tolkien? Photo by Pamela Chandler. © Diana Willson. Used with permission. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide. In the 1960s he was taken up by many members of the nascent “counter-culture” largely because of his concern with environmental issues.

In 1997 he came top of three British polls, organised respectively by Channel 4 / Waterstone’s, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK’s leading science fiction media magazine, amongst discerning readers asked to vote for the greatest book of the 20th century. Please note also that his name is spelt Tolkien (there is no “Tolkein”). Childhood and Youth The name “Tolkien” (pron.: Tol-keen; equal stress on both syllables) is believed to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever – hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used. His father’s side of the family appears to have migrated from Saxony in the 18th century, but over the century and a half before his birth had become thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial.

So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England – or more particularly, the West Midlands. The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien’s life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward’s School.

By then the family had moved to King’s Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line – young Ronald’s developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like” Nantyglo”,” Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”. Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1900, together with her sister May, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half-Spanish half-Welsh Father Francis Morgan. Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute.

At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys’ material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt-by-marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner. By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward’s; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the “T. C. B. S.” (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other’s literary work until 1916. However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner’s boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt.

When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they struck up a friendship, which gradually deepened. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. In the summer of 1911, he was invited to join a party on a walking holiday in Switzerland, which may have inspired his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and of Rivendell. In the autumn of that year he went up to Exeter College, Oxford where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the “midway” stage of a 4-year Oxford “Greats” (i.e. Classics) course, although with an “alpha plus” in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature.

One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf – he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet: Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men. (“Middangeard” was an ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.) This inspired some of his very early and inchoate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying. In the summer of 1913 he took a job as tutor and escort to two Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald’s, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French. Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1914.

War, Lost Tales and Academia Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [sic], which was heavily influenced by Finnish – but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [sic] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 22 March 1916. Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive.

After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire. During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “… in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin.

Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his “Legendarium”. He came to think of Edith as “Lúthien” and himself as “Beren”. Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917.

When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing – he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1920 he applied for the quite senior post of Reader (approximately, Associate Professor) in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed. At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and continued writing and refining The Book of Lost Tales and his invented “Elvish” languages.

In addition, he and Gordon founded a “Viking Club” for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists, a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes. Leeds also saw the birth of two more sons: Michael Hilary Reuel in October 1920, and Christopher Reuel in 1924. Then in 1925 the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford fell vacant; Tolkien successfully applied for the post. Professor Tolkien, The Inklings and Hobbits In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. Although he had few illusions about the academic life as a haven of unworldly scholarship (see for example Letters 250), he was nevertheless by temperament a don’s don, and fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.

However, his rare scholarly publications were often extremely influential, most notably his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”. His seemingly almost throwaway comments have sometimes helped to transform the understanding of a particular field – for example, in his essay on “English and Welsh”, with its explanation of the origins of the term “Welsh” and its references to phonaesthetics (both these pieces are collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, currently in print). His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In 1945 he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in 1959. Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration. His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon.

In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in North Oxford, and later Ronald and Edith lived in the suburb of Headington. However, Tolkien’s social life was far from unremarkable. He soon became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends (by no means all at the University) with similar interests, known as “The Inklings”. The origins of the name were purely facetious – it had to do with writing, and sounded mildly Anglo-Saxon; there was no evidence that members of the group claimed to have an “inkling” of the Divine Nature, as is sometimes suggested. Other prominent members included the above-mentioned Messrs Coghill and Dyson, as well as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and above all C. S. Lewis, who became one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and for whose return to Christianity Tolkien was at least partly responsible. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress. The Storyteller Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages.

As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“. In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins). She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm.

He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children’s recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication. By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit. He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion, or Silmarillion for short. He presented some of his “completed” tales to Unwin, who sent them to his reader. The reader’s reaction was mixed: dislike of the poetry and praise for the prose (the material was the story of Beren and Lúthien) but the overall decision at the time was that these were not commercially publishable. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit.

Tolkien was disappointed at the apparent failure of The Silmarillion, but agreed to take up the challenge of “The New Hobbit”. This soon developed into something much more than a children’s story; for the highly complex 16-year history of what became The Lord of the Rings consult the works listed below. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival (which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent). It is thanks to Rayner Unwin’s advocacy that we owe the fact that this book was published at all – Andave laituvalmes! His father’s firm decided to incur the probable loss of £1,000 for the succès d’estime, and publish it under the title of The Lord of the Rings in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.

The “Cult” The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis) to the damning (E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee) and just about everything in between. The BBC put on a drastically condensed radio adaptation in 12 episodes on the Third Programme. In 1956 radio was still a dominant medium in Britain, and the Third Programme was the “intellectual” channel. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales. The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the “Alternative Society”. This development produced mixed feelings in the author.

On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had similar experiences with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p.m. (their time – 3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest, what was the preterite of Quenyan lanta-, or whether or not Balrogs had wings. So he changed addresses, his telephone number went ex-directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a pleasant but uninspiring South Coast resort (Hardy’s “Sandbourne”), noted for the number of its elderly well-to-do residents. Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired (to his dismay), was really taking off – but that is another story, to be told in another place.

Other Writings Despite all the fuss over The Lord of the Rings, between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (see above); one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse, Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo and The Pearl, and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun – and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Smith of Wootton Major. The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien’s death. The long-awaited Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father’s incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth.

In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales, “itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all” (Unfinished Tales, p. 6, paragraph 1). The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market even for this relatively abstruse material and they decided to risk embarking on this “lengthy and complex study”. Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth, under Christopher’s editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. (Tolkien’s publishers had changed hands, and names, several times between the start of the enterprise in 1983 and the appearance of the paperback edition of Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth, in 1997.) Finis After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth.

On 29 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889-1971 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973 Further Reading J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings – The Romance of the Middle Ages England Manuscript J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and then Merton Professor of English in Oxford from 1925 to 1959. His phenomenally successful fictions draw on many influences, from Old Norse and Celtic mythology, to Old English poems such as Beowulf, to biblical narratives, romances, and medievalist and popular fiction, including William Morris’s books.

This draft page is from The Two Towers, second book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (published 1954–5). Tolkien’s visual and narrative imagination here works together, as he sketches the mountain pass through which Frodo and Sam attempt to cross into Mordor, where they are attacked by the giant spider Shelob. Tolkien first wrote the text in pencil, before going over it in ink. J.R.R. Tolkien | Wheaton J.R.R. Tolkien January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973 Menu Additional Tolkien Resources John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an academic and professor at Oxford University and author of the now widely popular The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works that have enormously shaped modern fantasy literature. In academic circles, Tolkien is recognized for his contributions to the study of language in literature In particular, his lecture "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics," published in 1936, is a major critical work about that important Old English poem. His other writings include poems and short stories.

Born in South Africa and a few years later taken to England for his health, Tolkien entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1911 and in 1915 took a First in English Language and Literature. In 1916, after a period of forced separation of several years, Tolkien married Edith Bratt with whom he eventually had four children. Tolkien served with the Lancashire Fusiliers from 1915-18, fought in the Battle of the Somme, and, contracting an illness, returned to England to recover. While recovering he began what was to be his life-long literary work The Silmarillion. Tolkien became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds in 1920, Professor of English Language at Leeds in 1924, and Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. During these years, he worked with E.V. Gordon on a critical edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and continued work on The Silmarillion. Early in the 1930s he began writing The Hobbit, which was published in 1937.

That same year, at the suggestion of his publisher, he began work on The Lord of the Rings, the first two volumes being published in 1954 and the third in 1955. In 1945, Tolkien was awarded the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. After his retirement, Tolkien wrote Smith of Wootton Major, Tree and Leaf, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and set about revising The Silmarillion, which was eventually completed by his son Christopher and published in 1977. Tolkien died at the age of 81 in September 1973. Tolkien was a devout and life-long Roman Catholic whose understanding of Christ's sacrifice and divinity, and of the spiritual truth embedded within human mythology helped persuade C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. Tolkien's adherence to the Catholic view of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds, and his belief in the inherent truth of mythology were the foundation for many of his works. J.R.R. Tolkien About J.R.R.

Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a very talented writer, is famous for having created such a literary genre as fantasy. All his books are real masterpieces, and many having read them once, want to read them again and again. Warm-hearted and exciting adventure stories, involving people, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, wizards, and, of course, hobbits are in Tolkiens accounts. But not only fantastic beings were concocted by him. Both philologist and professor at Oxford University, he knew many ancient and modern languages. Thus, a new world Middle-earth, along with its geography, its history, and several languages appeared. The history of this world goes into the depth of millenniums and stretches four epochs starting from the act of creation. J.R.R. Tolkien was born on 3rd January 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State. When he was four years old his mother, Marry Suffield, and his younger brother Hilary, went to England. At that time his father was ill and soon died of rheumatic fever. After his fathers death the family lived at Sarehole, on the south-eastern edge of Birmingham.

Ronald spent his childhood there and later scenes from this area would be depicted in his pictures and writings. Another tragic event occurred when J.R.R. Tolkien was 12 the death of his mother who died of diabetes. He and his brother Hilary became wards of a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. The boys attended King Edwards School in Birmingham. At school Ronald was interested in Classic as well as Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. At that time he began to develop his linguistic talent by creating his own languages with grammar and history. Not surprisingly that Tolkien was First in English Language and Literature at Exeter College. J.R.R. Tolkien was married to Edith Bratt. He had known her since they had both lived in the same house in Birmingham. Ronald loved Edith and continued to do so despite being forbidden by Father Morgan to contact her when he studied at college. Considering that it would ruin Ronalds career, Father Morgan would not give his consent to an early marriage. Tolkien was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers and participated in the battle of the Somme.

After the war he obtained a post on the New English Dictionary, and began to write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called The Book of Lost Tales but which eventually became known as The Silmarillion. Later Tolkien was appointed as Reader in the English Language at the University of Leeds. Among the students he was famous for his strong and popular teaching. Then Professor Tolkien was elected to continue work at Oxford, as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon. He taught Anglo-Saxon and English right up until his retirement in 1959. Honestly, many of the world scientists supposed that Tolkien had been one of the most gifted and clever philologists. By that time the Tolkiens family consisted of four children (three sons and a daughter) and more than anything father liked to tell his children about mythical beings elves, hobbits, etc. At first such stories were simply fairy tales. And the first book, which made him famous worldwide, the Hobbit (published in 1937) was written in the genre of a fairy tale. The book was a huge success and the public demanded a sequel. Thus, a popular trilogy the Lord of the Rings came into being.

Having retired, Tolkien and his wife lived first in the Headington area of Oxford, then moved to Bournemouth. His wife died in 1971 and after that Tolkien decided to return to Oxford. He was diagnosed as having a bleeding gastric ulcer, and despite some reassuring reports died on September 2nd 1973, aged 81. Tolkien and his wife are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. Although the greatest master of fantasy passed away, he left the door open for anyone to an enchanting world of his stories, the key to which is love, kindness and loyalty. These are the qualities that help Tolkiens characters to win over Evil. Lord of the Rings Fantasy World 2001-2009 J. R. R. Tolkien Dead at 81; Wrote 'The Lord of the Rings' J. R. R. Tolkien Dead at 81; Wrote 'The Lord of the Rings' By THE NEW YORK TIMES LONDON, Sept. 2-J. R. R. Tolkien, linguist, scholar and author of "The Lord of the Rings," died today in Bournemouth.

He was 81 years old. Three sons and a daughter survive. Creator of a World John Ronald Reuel Tolkien cast a spell over tens of thousands of Americans in the nineteen-sixties with his 500,000-word trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings," in essence a fantasy of the war between ultimate good and ultimate evil. Creating the complex but consistent world of Middle Earth, complete with elaborate maps, Tolkien peopled it with hobbits, elves, dwarves, men, wizards and Ents, and Orcs (goblins) and other servants of the Dark Lord, Sauron. In particular, he described the adventures of one hobbit, Frodo son of Drogo, who became the Ring Bearer and the key figure in the destruction of the Dark Tower. As Gandalf, the wizard, remarked, there was more to him than met they eye. The story can be read on many levels. But the author, a scholar and linguist, for 39 years a teacher, denied emphatically that it was an allegory.

The Ring, discovered by Frodo's uncle, Bilbo Baggins, in an earlier book, "The Hobbit," has the power to make its wearer invisible, but it is infinitely evil. Tolkien admirers compared him favorably with Milton, Spenser and Tolstoy. His English publisher, Sir Stanley Unwin, speculated that "The Lord of the Rings" would be more likely to live beyond his and his son's time than any other work he had printed. 'Escapist Literature' But detractors, among them the critic Edmund Wilson, put down "The Lord of the Rings," Tolkien's most famous and most serious fantasy, as a "children's book which has somehow gotten out of hand." A London Observer critic condemned it in 1961 as "sheer escapist literature... dull, ill-written and whimsical" and expressed the wish that Tolkien's work would soon pass into "merciful oblivion." It did anything but. It was just four years later, printed in paperback in this country by Ballantine and Ace Books, that a quarter of a million copies of the trilogy were sold in 10 months.

In the late sixties all over America fan clubs sprouted, such as the Tolkien Society of America, and members of the cult-many of them students-decorated their walls with the maps of Middle Earth. The trilogy was also published in hard cover by Houghton Mifflin and was a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection. The creator of this monumental, controversial work (or sub-creator as he preferred to call writers of fantasy) was an authority on Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Chaucer. He was a gentle, blue-eyed, donnish-appearing man who favored tweeds, smoked a pipe and liked to take walks and ride an old bicycle (though he converted to a stylish car with the success of his books). From 1925 to 1959 he was a professor at Oxford, ultimately Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and a fellow of Merton College. He was somewhat bemused by the acclaim his extracurricular fantasy received-at the endless interpretations that variously called it a great Christian allegory, the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages and a philological game. Tolkien maintained, however, that it wasn't intended as an allegory. "I don't like allegories.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me," he said. The trilogy was written, he recalled, to illustrate a 1938 lecture of his at the University of Glasgow on fairy stories. He admitted that fairy stories were something of an escape, but didn't see why there should not be an escape from the world of factories, machine-guns and bombs. It was joy, he said, that was the mark of the true fairy story: "...However wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality." His own fantasy, it was said, had begun when he was correcting examination papers one day and happened to scratch at the top of one of the dullest "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Then hobbits began to take shape. They were, he decided, "little people, smaller than the bearded dwarves. Hobbits have no beards.

There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colors (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner which they have twice a day when they can get it)." Discovering England He settled these protected innocents in a land called Shire, patterned after the English countryside he had discovered as a child of 4 arriving from his birthplace in South Africa, and he sent some of them off on perilous adventures. Most of them, however, he conceived as friendly and industrious but slightly dull, which occasioned his scribble on that fortuitous exam paper. "If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth," Tolkien once said.

His trilogy was filled with his knowledge of botany and geology. The author was born in Blomfontein on Jan. 3, 1892, a son of Arthur Reuel Tolkien, a bank manager, and Mabel Suffield Tolkien, who had served as a missionary in Zanzibar. Both parents had come from Birmingham, and when the boy's father died, his mother took him and his brother home to the English Midlands. England seemed to him "a Christmas tree" after the barrenness of Africa, where he had been stung by a tarantula and bitten by a snake, where he was "kidnapped" temporarily by a black servant who wanted to show him off to his kraal. It was good, after that, to be in a comfortable place where people lived "tucked away from all the centers of disturbance." At the same time, he once noted in an essay on fairy stories, "I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish them to be in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world..." His mother was his first teacher, and his love of philology, as well as his longing for adventure, was attributed to her influence.

But in 1904 she died. The Tolkiens were converts to Catholicism, and he and his brother became the wards of a priest in Birmingham. (Some critics maintained that the bleakness of industrial Birmingham was the inspiration for his trilogy's evil land of the Enemy, Mordor.) Served in World War I Young Tolkien attended the King Edward's Grammar School and went on to Exeter College, Oxford, on scholarship. He received his B.A. in 1915. But World War I had begun, and, at 23, he began service in the Lancashire Fusiliers. A year later he married Miss Edith Bratt. The war was said by his friends to have profoundly affected him. The writer C. S. Lewis insisted that it was reflected in some of the more sinister aspects of his writing and in his heroes' joy in comradeship. Tolkien's regiment suffered heavy casualties and when the war ended, only one of his close friends was still alive. Invalided out of the Fusiliers, Tolkien decided in the hospital that the study of language was to be his metier. He returned to Oxford to receive his M.A.

in 1919, and to work as an assistant on the Oxford Dictionary. Two years later he began his teaching career at the University of Leeds. Within four years, he was a professor, and had also published a "Middle English Vocabulary" and an edition (with E. V. Gordon) of "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight." He received a call to Oxford, where his lectures on philology soon gave him an extraordinary reputation. His students remember him as taking endless pains to interest them. One recalled that there was something of the hobbit about him. He walked, she said, "as if on furry feet," and had an appealing jollity. Meanwhile, once he had scratched that word "hobbit" on the examination paper, his curiosity about hobbits was piqued, and the book of that name-the precursor of the more serious "The Lord of the Rings"-began to grow. It was nurtured by weekly meetings with his friends and colleagues, including the philosopher and novelist C. S. Lewis and his brother, W. H. Lewis, and the mystical novelist Charles Williams.

The Inklings, as they called themselves, gathered at Magdalen College or a pub to drink beer and share one another's manuscripts. C. S. Lewis thought well enough of "The Hobbit," which Tolkien began to write in 1937 (and told to his children), to suggest that he submit it for publication to George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. It was accepted, and the American edition won a Herald Tribune prize as best children's book. The author always insisted, however, that neither "The Hobbit" nor "The Lord of the Rings" was intended for children. "It's not even very good for children," he said of "The Hobbit," which he illustrated himself. "I wrote some of it in a style for children, but that's what they loathe. If I hadn't done that, though, people would have thought I was loony." "If you're a youngish man," he told a London reporter, "and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're writing for children." "The Lord of the Rings," he admitted, began as an exercise in "linguistic esthetics" as well as an illustration of his theory on fairy tales.

Then the story itself captured him. Took 14 Years to Write In 1954 "The Fellowship of the Ring," the first volume of the trilogy, appeared. "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" were the second and third parts. The work, which has a 104-page appendix and took 14 years to write, is filled with verbal jokes, strange alphabets, names from the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh. For its story, it calls, among others, on the legend of "The Ring of the Nibelung" and the early Scandinavian classic, the "Elder Edda." Meanwhile, Tolkien was also busy with scholarly writings, which included "Chaucer As a Philologist," "Beowulf, the Monster and the Critics" and "The Ancrene Wisse," a guide for the medieval anchoresses. After retirement, he lived on in the Oxford suburb of Headington, "working like hell," he said, goaded to resume his writing on a myth of the Creation and Fall called "The Silmarillion," which he had begun even before his trilogy.

As he said in an interview a few years ago, "A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen." J.R.R. Tolkien (Author of The Hobbit) Fantasy , Fiction , Children's Influences edit data John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, was an English writer, poet, WWI veteran (a First Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, British Army), philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the high fantasy classic works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis . Christopher Tolkien published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion .

These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented l John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, was an English writer, poet, WWI veteran (a First Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, British Army), philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the high fantasy classic works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis . Christopher Tolkien published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion . These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the word "legendarium" to the larger part of these writings.

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or more precisely, high fantasy. Tolkien's writings have inspired many other works of fantasy and have had a lasting effect on the entire field. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Forbes ranked him the 5th top-earning dead celebrity in 2009. Religious influences J.R.R. Tolkien, was born in South Africa in 1892, but his family moved to Britain when he was about 3 years old. When Tolkien was 8 years old, his mother converted to Catholicism, and he remained a Catholic throughout his life. In his last interview, two years before his death, he unhesitatingly testified, “I’m a devout Roman Catholic.” Tolkien married his childhood sweetheart, Edith, and they had four children.

He wrote them letters each year as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters . One of Tolkien’s sons became a Catholic priest. Tolkien was an advisor for the translation of the Jerusalem Bible . Tolkien once described The Lord of the Rings to his friend Robert Murray, an English Jesuit priest, as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." There are many theological themes underlying the narrative including the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace. In addition the saga includes themes which incorporate death and immortality, mercy and pity, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing.

In addition The Lord's Prayer "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" was reportedly present in Tolkien's mind as he described Frodo's struggles against the power of the "One Ring.'' ...more Oxfordshire inspired Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings - BBC News BBC News Oxfordshire inspired Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings By Linda Serck BBC News, South 3 January 2013 Close share panel Image caption J.R.R. Tolkien moved to Oxford in 1911 Celebrations are taking place around the world to mark the 121st birthday of novelist and academic Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, who was born on 3 January 1892. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings while living in Oxford. So I scribbled on it, I can't think why, 'in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' J.R.R. Tolkien "[I remember] the actual flashpoint," Tolkien told the BBC in March 1968 about his idea for The Hobbit. "I can still see the corner in my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened.

"I'd got an enormous pile of exam papers there and was marking school examinations in the summer time, which was very laborious, and unfortunately also boring. "I remember picking up a paper and nearly gave it an extra mark, or extra five marks actually, because one page on this particular paper was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. "So I scribbled on it, I can't think why, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'." The Inklings The idea came during the more than 50 years of his adult life that Tolkien spent in Oxford. "He moved to Oxford in 1911 to study classics at Exeter College, he was rejected the year before but got in the year afterwards," says The Tolkien Society's Shaun Gunner. Image caption Tolkien is buried at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford "But he didn't actually enjoy classics so he later changed to study English Language and Literature". During that period, Tolkien worked for two years on the Oxford English Dictionary after serving in World War I.

"Then he took a brief two years out in Leeds and came back and became the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, and did that for many years until 1945," said Mr Gunner. Afterwards, Tolkien became the Merton College Professor of English Language and Literature, a role he stayed in until 1959. He formed a meeting group in Oxford called The Inklings with fellow academic author C.S. Lewis and other friends. The Eagle And Child pub was their most famous meeting place, where a plaque inside the pub commemorates their get-togethers. Tolkien's final resting place was at Wolvercote Cemetery in north Oxford. 'Antiquity and atmosphere' But what was it about the city that Tolkien loved so much? "It was the antiquity and its atmosphere of learning, its second hand book shops and the fact that it provided him with the company of learned companions who encouraged him in what he wrote," John Garth, author of Tolkien And The Great War said. Oxfordshire also provided Tolkien with rich textures for the landscapes in his books, which were necessary for the format he had chosen.

Speaking to the BBC about The Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien said: "One of the best forms for a long narrative, as was found in The Hobbit, is a much more elaborate form of the pilgrimage or the journey with an object, so that was inevitably the form I adopted." Image caption The Rollright Stones may have inspired the Barrow-downs scenery in Tolkien's books Mr Garth said: "Oxford is a river valley lined with willows. In The Lord of the Rings, although it doesn't feature in the films, there is a character called Old Man Willow, who was a predatory demon in the shape of a tree and tries to trap the hobbits and casts a spell of sleepiness on them". Mr Garth adds that the landscape beyond city also may have proved inspirational. For example, the rolling Berkshire Downs, the Vale of White Horse with its prehistoric horse hill figure, and notably the Rollright Stones, near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. "These stones may have provided an inspiration for the Barrow-downs, where the hobbits in The Lord Of The Rings are ensnared by a malevolent wraith that haunts a barrow or burial mound," said Mr Garth.

On 3 January, Tolkien fans in the UK, Brazil, USA, Canada, Spain, Australia, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands will be celebrating the author's birthday with a host of parties and events In the UK events are taking place in cities including Brighton, London, Oxford, Bristol, Milton Keynes, and York with a toast to Tolkien at 21:00 GMT. J.R.R. Tolkien and the OED | Oxford English Dictionary J.R.R. Tolkien and the OED By Peter Gilliver, OED Amid all the publicity surrounding this year’s release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’. Soon after my own employment on the Dictionary began in 1987, I decided to investigate just what Tolkien’s contribution had been in that period.

As one of the assistants of Henry Bradley, the second of the four Editors of the First Edition of the OED, Tolkien worked on words near the beginning of the letter W. The first entry in the published Dictionary on which he is known to have worked is that for the noun waggle; he also worked on the verb, the main sense of which he defined as ‘to move (anything held or fixed at one end) to and fro with short quick motions, or with a rapid undulation; esp. to shake (any movable part of the body)’. The great majority of the entries for which slips of paper in Tolkien’s distinctive handwriting survive in the OED archives lie in the alphabetical range waggle to warlock. Some words, including walnut, walrus, and wampum, seem to have been assigned to Tolkien because of their particularly difficult etymologies. In the case of walrus, he wrote out many different versions of the etymology – six of which, remarkably, have survived in the archives thanks to Tolkien’s habit of recycling discarded slips by turning them over and writing on the other side.

In fact walnut, walrus, and wampum were among the few entries singled out by Henry Bradley when the fascicle W to Wash was published in 1921 as containing ‘etymological facts or suggestions not given in other dictionaries’. Characteristically, Tolkien continued to puzzle over some of these etymologies long after he had left the OED to take up a post at Leeds University: a notebook survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford containing many pages of notes on walrus written in the 1920s, and he may have lectured on this topic in Leeds. A discarded draft by Tolkien of part of the entry for ‘walrus’: © Image copyright Oxford University Press This image may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Oxford University Press. Other words, such as waistcoat, wake (noun), wan, and want, posed rather different challenges. Teasing out fine distinctions of meaning is a key part of a lexicographer’s job, as is the selection of words to convey precisely the connotations, as well as the simple meaning, of a word: Tolkien evidently took great pains over both.

He relished the task of distinguishing the different garments denoted at different times by waistcoat (as he later grew to relish the garment itself); among the numerous drafts of his definitions of wake which survive are many colourful turns of phrase which he considered in his attempts to convey the spirit of a wake; and he was clearly fascinated by the change in meaning undergone by wan, which in Old English was applied to dark or gloomy things, and carried no suggestion of pallor or faintness. His biggest challenge, however, must surely have been want, one of the commonest of all verbs, which eventually required nearly thirty separately defined senses and subsenses. A discarded draft by Tolkien of part of the entry for ‘wake’: © Image copyright Oxford University Press This image may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Oxford University Press. Following his work on the OED, Tolkien of course went on to publish widely in the field of philology, beginning with his substantial glossary to Kenneth Sisam’s anthology Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921). However, in 1969 he became directly involved with the OED again in a very different way.

At this time the second volume (H to N) of the Supplement was in preparation, and the word hobbit came up for consideration, as the evidence in the OED‘s files showed that it had achieved currency. The editor of the Supplement, Robert Burchfield, had studied under Tolkien in Oxford, and knew him well: in an appreciation published in 1989 he recorded his gratitude to ‘the puckish fisherman who drew me into his glittering philological net’. Burchfield wrote to Tolkien to ask for his comments on a first draft of the Dictionary entry for hobbit. Tolkien’s reply was characteristically painstaking: he offered a definition which was more than twice as long as that submitted by Burchfield, who subsequently published the longer version almost exactly as the creator of The Lord of the Rings had supplied it: In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men.

In due course a few other Middle-Earth coinages also made their way into the OED, including mathom, orc (both in fact revivals of Old English words), and mithril. (The June 2002 update of OED Online features a revised entry for mithril, including earlier evidence of Tolkien’s use of the word.) An entry for the derivative orcish has been prepared, and no doubt others will follow: for example, our files already contain examples of the word balrog. Tolkien’s impact on the English language continues unabated. Much of the material in this article was included in a paper given at the Tolkien Centenary Conference in 1992.

Question: At which English university was J. R. R. Tolkein a professor when he wrote The Lord Of The Rings?
Answer: Oxford